How to Create Design with AI Without It Looking Like Everyone Else’s

AI is a fast junior

AI can quickly create a first draft, write components, or adjust an existing page. But it does not automatically know your brand, your customers, or why a particular website should have a certain character.

More specific instructions and prepared materials usually lead to better results than a generic prompt. AIFred describes a similar experience when working with Claude Design: design can be created quickly, but the final refinement and technical implementation still take time.

So treat AI like a very fast junior colleague:

• It can prepare variations and handle routine work.

• It needs precise instructions.

• Its first draft is not a finished product.

• You decide the taste, priorities, and final call.

Why “AI design” happens

Models learn from huge amounts of existing websites. When they are not given specific guidance, they fall back on the average — the patterns that repeat most often across the internet.

Typical artifacts of generated design include:

• Purple or blue gradients with no connection to the brand.

• Three identical feature cards side by side.

• Too many pill buttons, badges, and status dots.

• Artificial “tech” elements, such as a fake terminal or a dashboard made only of colored divs.

• Text decorations like “TYPE / FORM / MOTION”.

• A “scroll down” arrow even though everyone knows the page continues below.

• Random combinations of corner radii, colors, and illustration styles.

Taste Skill explicitly labels these recurring patterns as an “anti-slop” problem. Its rules, for example, by default forbid three identical cards in a row, AI-purple gradients, fake product interfaces, and decorative status dots.

Start before the prompt

Before you open Cursor, Claude Code, or another AI tool, prepare a simple design brief. It does not have to be a twenty-page document. Just answer a few questions:

• Who is the website for? For example: the owner of a small roastery, not a visitor to a generic SaaS site.

• What should the person do? Buy a product, book a consultation, reserve a time slot?

• What should it feel like? Calm, raw, premium, playful, technical, editorial?

• What should be avoided? For example gradients, icons in circles, stock photos, or overly rounded corners.

• What materials already exist? Logo, font, colors, photos, examples of competitors, and inspiration.

Instead of the prompt:

Design a modern website for a café.

try writing:

Design a website for a small specialty coffee roastery in Plzeň. The target audience is people who care about coffee origin and like local businesses. The visual style should feel grounded, slightly editorial, and tactile, not technological. Use warm cream, dark brown, and one rust-colored accent. Avoid gradients, three identical cards, icons in circles, and generic photos. Work with large typography, original coffee photography, and an asymmetrical grid.

Then AI is not just told to “make a nice website.” It has clear boundaries.

Let AI propose variations

A common mistake is accepting the first design. The first version is usually more of a test of whether AI understood the brief.

A better approach:

1. Ask for three distinct directions, not three small variations of the same layout.

2. Choose one based on whether it fits the brand and the page goal.

3. Ask AI to explain its decisions: hierarchy, use of color, typography, and content.

4. Only then deal with details and implementation.

A good prompt for the second round might be:

Create three truly different concepts. The first should be editorial and typographic, the second photographic and organic, the third minimalist and product-focused. Do not use the same hero layout or three identical feature cards.

This prevents AI from simply rearranging the same blocks.

Build a system, not an image

Design feels professional not because it has a nice hero image. It feels professional because it behaves consistently across the whole page: the same spacing, typography, colors, buttons, and tone of voice.

So write down simple rules:

• One main accent color.

• One corner system: sharp, slightly rounded, or strongly rounded.

• Two to three text size levels.

• A limited number of button types.

• A clearly defined style for photos and icons.

Taste Skill has three “locks” for this: consistency of the accent color, consistency of shapes, and one page theme — light, dark, or automatic. It is not dogma, but a practical safeguard against every section looking like it was designed by a different AI.

Impeccable: a helper for the whole process

Impeccable is a set of commands and rules for AI coding tools. It does not try to create design in one prompt; instead, it guides the process from brief to critique to final polish. It works with context files such as PRODUCT.md and DESIGN.md so AI knows what the product does and how it should look.

Installation

From the project root, run:

bash

npx impeccable install

Then in your AI tool, use:

text

/impeccable init

The tool creates the basic context, and you can continue with a command like:

text

/impeccable polish pricing page

The documentation mentions support for tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, or Gemini CLI; after installation, you need to reload the AI tool.

What it can do

• /impeccable shape helps create a design brief before any code is written.

• /impeccable critique performs a design review, including scoring and automatic issue detection.

• /impeccable polish is for final refinement.

• /impeccable typeset addresses generic or inconsistent typography.

• /impeccable live lets you select elements directly in the browser, create variations, and accept one into the source code.

Pros and cons

ProsConsImpeccableGuides AI from brief to quality control, works well for existing projects, and includes commands for specific design problems. It is more extensive, so it pays to spend some time setting up the context and learning the commands.InstallationOne command via npx, followed by initialization in the AI tool. It is mainly intended for people working with a project and code, not just for one-off website image generation.

For developers, it is a good choice if you do not want to start from scratch every time and want design rules stored directly in the repository.

Taste Skill: a brake on generic output

Taste Skill is a simpler set of instructions in SKILL.md format. The AI agent reads this file and follows its rules when building the frontend.

The basic installation in a project is:

bash

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill --skill "design-taste-frontend"

A SKILL.md file is added to the project; according to the documentation, no further configuration is needed. However, the default installation currently uses experimental version 2, so its rules may still change.

What it checks

Taste Skill first reads the brief and derives layout, content density, motion, and the appropriate design direction from it. If the brief matches a known design system such as Material, Bootstrap, or shadcn, it should use the official solution instead of a visual imitation.

Its biggest strength is the specific ban on repeated AI clichés. Among other things, it limits:

• Purple gradients and mesh blobs.

• Three identical cards in one row.

• Decorative labels, fake version numbers, and unnecessary status elements.

• Fake interfaces instead of real screenshots or relevant visuals.

• Nonsensical scroll listeners in JavaScript.

Pros and cons

ProsConsTaste SkillFast installation, no required configuration, clear rules against the most common AI clichés. The rules may be too strict for a specific brand and need adjustment.CustomizationSKILL.md can be edited, extended with your own style guide, or stripped of rules. The default v2 is experimental, so behavior may change between updates.

Taste Skill is a good quick safeguard for anyone generating frontend in Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or a similar tool.

The best approach is a combination

Taste Skill works as a short taste filter: “Please don’t generate this anymore.” Impeccable is more of a process partner: “First understand the product, then design, critique, and refine.”

A practical workflow might look like this:

1. Write a short brief and add real materials.

2. Add Taste Skill so AI does not drift into the most common templates.

3. In Impeccable, create project context with /impeccable init.

4. Ask for several truly different directions.

5. Implement the chosen direction in stages.

6. Run /impeccable critique and fix specific weaknesses.

7. Finally, use /impeccable polish, but only where it improves usability or brand character.aifred+1

Final check

Before you release the design, ask yourself five simple questions:

• Would I recognize this page as belonging to this brand even without the logo?

• Does every visual element have a reason to be there?

• Are cards, icons, and blocks repeating only because AI likes to generate them?

• Does the page work without animations?

• Would a customer easily choose the main action?

AI can save you hours of work. But taste, context, and the ability to say “this is too generic” still remain with you. The best AI design does not come from the longest prompt, but from good decisions made over a few honest rounds.